Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity

185 Pages·2015·3.26 MB·English

Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of
Antiquity
by
Amy Marie Fisher
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department for the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Amy Marie Fisher 2015
Celestial Topography: Mapping the Divine Realms of Antiquity
Amy Marie Fisher
Doctorate of Philosophy
Department for the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
2015
Abstract
This dissertation explores the cartographic descriptions and depictions of the heavens in
antiquity, specifically the 1st century BCE through the early 5th century CE. The physical nature
of the heavens and the loci each portrayal includes or excludes tells the reader a great deal about
the communities creating and engaging with these various understandings of the heavens. This
study offers a series of snapshots of differing depictions of the heavens from various times and
places in early Judaism and Christianity; the poetic Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from the Dead
Sea Scrolls, the depictions of 1st Century CE apocalypses, the first explicitly Christian tour of
heaven in the Visio Pauli, and the artistic renderings of late antique Palestinian synagogue
mosaics. In order to read these many spaces and their mythic places out, the study engages with
various critical spatial theories, demonstrating that a nuanced deployment of modern spatial
theory can yield fruitful results in the study of antiquity. In addition it offers one answer to the
question of why the heavens developed and became so complex in the second temple and post
second temple period. This dissertation suggests that this complexity was a natural development
of pre-exilic proclivities for seeing the earthly temple as a miniature copy of the heavenly one;
albeit one forced to develop due to imperial expansion upon the earth. The expanded holdings of
heaven, while losing their importance as loci from the mythic past, were retained in early
Christian maps of the heavens as the resting places of so many different sorts of righteous.
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Acknowledgments
This project owes much to many people, some of whom receive multiple thanks in different
capacities below. First and foremost, thanks to my committee members, my adviser John
Kloppenborg, and Professors Judith Newman and Jennifer Harris. All three offered copious and
constructive feedback on the project and made it a much stronger and coherent piece than it
would have been without them. The idea for this project was born on a hot summer afternoon in
the upper Galilee, in a brainstorming session with my undergraduate adviser and constant
mentor, Nanette Goldman. I hope you are proud of the final product Nanette! Thanks go to my
colleagues and peers in my dissertation writing group, Rebecca Bartel, Michelle Christian, Jairan
Gahan, Nathalie LaCoste, and Justin Stein, who all offered up ample and honest feedback on an
early draft of the introduction. Nathalie and Michelle, along with Maria Dasios, Brigidda Bell,
and Sarah Rollens also provided feedback and aid in other chapters of this piece, for which I am
most grateful. Emily Springgay, Laurie Drake, Yaniv Feller and Jessica Radin offered ‘outsider’
support and advice at various stages of this project. Students in RLG203Y1Y, Introduction to
Christianity, all got the chance to read descriptions of Visio Pauli’s City of Christ and work
through its geography in group work, which allowed their instructor to reflect on its set up too.
Versions of chapters two and three were presented at Society of Biblical Literature panels; the
feedback from those audiences has at least been gestured to in the footnotes here. I also
presented a version of chapter two at my departmental colloquium, at which Dr. Simon Coleman
offered helpful feedback. The Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of
Toronto, with Dr. Doris Bergen as the Director of Graduate Studies there, provided me with top
up funding for all five years of my doctoral studies, travel grants for my work in Israel in the
summer, and part time employment in my upper years, for which I am most grateful. In addition
the staff at the Centre, Sol, Emily, and Galina have offered much career and life advice
throughout my PhD. Thank you all for the supportive environment you work so hard to
maintain. The staff at the Joint Archaeological Expedition to Omrit has been a constant source
of encouragement throughout my entire doctoral program; thanks go to Dr.s Andrew Overman,
Daniel Schowalter, Benjamin Rubin, Jason Schlude, Michael Nelson, and Jennifer Gates-Foster.
Indeed, I both wrote the proposal for and last bits of this project at the site, in the “free time” of
the afternoons and evenings. I began work on another project with Dr. Peter Richardson, shortly
after I started this dissertation, and I must thank Peter for the use of his office, his advice on all
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matters academic, and his patience with my falling behind on deadlines for that project as I
slogged away on this one. I promise I will now work as hard on “the Herod book” as I have been
working on this dissertation. My parents, who have moved me from school to school, receive
many thanks for their lenghty support of my pursuit of higher education. My far flung American
friends receive simcere thanks for all the long distance phone calls and short visits throughout
my five years as an ex-pat; many thanks for your cheerful chats Anne Stewart, Claire Wan,
Maureen Ragalie, Megan Roberts, and Samantha Petty. Lastly, especial thanks for all the
encouragement, advice, picnics, outings, and in this last year, when like the railway we were
trans-Canadian, the care packages that always contained loose leaf tea, to Dan.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Work …………………………………………………………... 1
1.1 Critical Spatial Theory …………………………………………………………….. 6
1.2 Overview of the Project …………………………………………………………… 20
1.3 The Primary Texts Under Consideration …………………………………………. 21
Chapter 2: The Poetics of Temple Space: the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice’s Heavenly Temple
and Temple-ish Heaven ………………………………………………………………. 25
2.1 An Overview of the Shirot ………………………………………………………. 27
2.2 Ekphrases of the Tabernacle and the Temple …………………………………… 33
2.3 Elsner’s Ritual Visuality and the Politics of Viewing …………………………... 37
2.4 The Politics of Temple Ekphrasis ………………………………………………... 39
2.5 The Spatiality of the Shirot ………………………………………………………. 43
Chapter 3: Catastrophe and the Stoic Spaces of Coping: the Hidden Places of 3 Baruch …… 56
3.1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………… 56
3.2 Third Baruch …………………………………………………………………….. 59
3.3 A Brief Review of the Literature on 3 Baruch to Date …………………………… 62
3.4 Introduction to the World of 3 Baruch …………………………………………… 64
3.5 The Heavenly Places of 1st Century CE Apocalyptic Texts ……………………… 72
3.6 Bachelard’s Poetics of Space ……………………………………………………... 82
3.7 The Continuation of Cosmic Time in 3 Baruch’s Heavens ………………………. 85
3.8 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 89
Chapter 4: The Heavenly Holdings of Souls: the Visio Pauli’s Confused Cartography …….. 91
4.1 Introduction to the Visio Pauli …………………………………………………… 92
4.2 The Relation of the Visio Pauli to Other Early Apocalypses ……………………. 99
4.3 The Places of the Heaven in the Visio Pauli …………………………………….. 100
4.4 A Cosmological Introduction? The Opening Scene of the Visio Pauli as
Cosmology ……………………………………………………………………. 106
4.5 The Problem of Placing the ‘Land of Promise’ and the Purpose of Cartography in the
Visio Pauli ……………………………………………………………………. 111
4.6 Addendum: the Lack of a Heavenly Temple in Visio Pauli ……………………… 116
4.7 Conclusions ………………………………………………………………………. 119
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Chapter 5: Tessellated Territories: Mosaic Maps of the Late Antique Jewish Heavens ……... 121
5.1 The Synagogue Mosaics ………………………………………………………...... 122
5.2 Early Scholastic Reception of the Synagogue Mosaics ………………………...... 125
5.3 Trends in the Depiction of Hebrew Bible Scenes in Late Antique Christian Art .... 130
5.4 Mosaics as Maps: a Non-polemical and Spatial Reading of the Synagogue
Zodiacs ………………………………………………………………………... 139
5.5 Polemic or Cultural Borrowing: Physical Places as the Cosmos Writ Small in Late
Antiquity ……………………………………………………………………… 151
5.6 Conclusions ……………………………………………………………………….. 152
Chapter 6: Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………… 153
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………….. 158
Appendix ……………………………………………………………………………………… 173

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List of Tables

Table 4.1: Traditional Division of Vis. Paul ………………………………………………….. 101
Table 4.2: Proposed Division of Vis. Paul …………………………………………………..... 104
Table 4.3: Opening Section of Vis. Paul as Map of the Heavens …………………………….. 109
Table 5.1: The Various Schematics of the Heavens ………………………………………….. 142

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1
Chapter 1
1 Introduction to the Work
In the Phaedo, Socrates, speaking of the soul’s journey to the afterlife, remarks
the journey is not as Telephus says in the play of Aeschylus; for he says a simple
path leads to the lower world, but I think the path is neither simple nor single, for
if it were, there would be no need of guides, since no one could miss the way to
any place if there were only one road. But really there seem to be many forks of
the road and many windings; this I infer from the rites and ceremonies practiced
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here on earth (Plato, Phaedo 107b-108a).
While Socrates is specifically talking about the journey to the underworld, he could have been
speaking of the journeys of various adepts and prophets into the heavens of antiquity. No two
narratives of the heavens of early Judaism and Christianity agree with one another as to the
layout of the heavens, which mythic topoi are within them, or in what order one reaches these
various sites. While the idea of heaven was not new in the late Second Temple period, this era,
and the period of time just after it, witnessed an explosion of texts dealing with the topography
and geography of the heavens, which was accompanied by an increase in the complexities of
these heavens. No longer was heaven a simple plane with the heavenly temple seated upon it, as
Enoch in the Book of Watchers had claimed (1 Enoch). Rather, the heavenly temple was just one
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of the many topoi of these new multi-level heavens, if a very important and holy topos. Indeed,
the various issues and problems various groups in this time period had with the Second Temple
and Jerusalem more generally contributed to this desire to assure themselves, as well as others,
that all was still ordered, pure, and holy in the heavenly temple, irrespective of events in
Jerusalem. In addition, the choice, description, and use within the narrative of the various
mythic topoi reveals the particular concerns and needs of the intended audience for these

1
Plato, Phaedo 107b-108a (trans. David Gallop; Oxford: Claredon, 1975).
2
This choice of the words topos and topoi is something I discuss below, in the my section on critical spatial theory.
2
different works. Reflected in the heavens of these various texts one finds the concerns and
questions of each group answered.3
While the past century has witnessed an increased attention to literature devoted to accounts of
trips to heaven, the topography of the heavens visited has not been the focus of scholars’
attention. Rather, focus has centered on the journeys themselves, the figure of the sojourner, or
4
the source of these fantastic tales that erupt in the Second Temple period. This is an analytic
oversight, for the heavens of antiquity were filled with various mythic topoi that frequently were
thought to have had a place on the earth in the dim and fabled past. These places include the
Temple of God, which holds the Throne Room of God, the Throne of God, the chariot of God,
the Garden of Eden, and in addition to the Garden, certain individual “natural” features,
including streams of water (or other liquids), trees, sometimes named and sometimes not, and in
the later texts, lakes. The geography of the ancient heaven is varied but complex in every text
one picks up; this intricate divine biosphere deserves closer examination than scholars have
given it. Indeed, the closest one comes to finding a study on the topography of heaven is actually
work done on early conceptions of hell, a field begun by Martha Himmelfarb, with the

3
One might also note that the fervor to describe heaven somewhat stabilized in Medieval writings, with the
recasting and retellings of tales originally created in antiquity. As Christianity obtained a dominant hand in society,
they no longer had need of claiming intimate knowledge of the celestial spheres and Judaism backed away from
apocalypticism, with mystics taking over the role of sojourner to the heavens, but their descriptions of their trips are
focused much more on the knowledge required to get past the angelic guards at each level, than on the topography of
each level of heaven. On Medieval Christian literature on the heavens see for example, Jane Baun, Tales from
Another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, ed, Last Things: Death and the
Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Eileen Gardiner, Medieval
Visions of Heaven and Hell: a Sourcebook (New York, 1993); and Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Paradise, Death, and
Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Jewish Merkabah
mysticism see David Blumenthal, Understanding Jewish Mysticism: a Source Reader (New York: Ktav Publishing
House, 1978); David J. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature (New Haven, CN: American Oriental
Society, 1980); and Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
4
See, for example, Dereck Daschke, City of Ruins: Mourning the Destruction of Jerusalem through Jewish
Apocalypse (Biblical Interpretation Series; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010); Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven
in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York : Oxford University Press, 1993); Leif Carlsson, Round Trips to
Heaven: Otherworldly Travelers in Early Judaism and Christianity (trans. Judy Breneman; Lund Studies in History
of Religions; Lund: Department of History and Anthropology of Religions, Lund University, 2004); Kenneth R.
Jones, Jewish Reactions to the Destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70: Apocalypses and Related Pseudepigrapha
(Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism; Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011); Adela Yarbro Collins,
Cosmology and Eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1996); and
Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: a Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (New York:
Crossroad, 1982).
3
publication of her monograph Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian
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Literature, in the early 1980s. These studies dwell on one place amongst the many that filled
the landscape of ancient heavens, the hellish regions. These works on early conceptions of hell,
while examining the role of hell in the heavens, leave unanswered the question of how this
singular place related to all the other places of these heavens and how and why all its
neighboring mythic loci came to be held in the celestial spheres, instead of remaining on terra
firma.
In this project, I am not attempting to compile a catalogue of ancient descriptions of heaven, for
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others have already done this work, in both popular and scholarly works. I am also not proving
a teleological point about the development of the heavens; the composition of the heavens varied
from period to period and group to group, but it did not proceed in a strictly linear fashion,
beginning with the single plane of 1 Enoch and ending with a singular prototype for Dante’s
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adoption. For example, the canonical Revelation is in fact archaizing in its description of a
single-planed heaven, with its circle of enthroned individuals. As I show in chapters three and
four the “typical” heaven, Jewish or Christian, of the post 70 CE landscape was a multi-faceted
and multi-leveled place. In this work, I am, however, interested in charting broad shifts in the
ways of depicting the heavens, and how terrestrial events affected these celestial depictions. To
that end, I use critical spatial theory to read out the topoi of these heavens and to better
understand the heuristic moves being made with each change to the topography of heaven. In
addition, rather than log a whole catalogue of different depictions of the heavens from antiquity,
I have instead chosen to focus my attention on a particular text from a particular period and

5
Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
6
See, for example, Mary Dean-Otting, Heavenly Journeys: A Study of the Motif in Hellenistic Jewish Literature
(Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1984); April D. DeConick, ed., Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian
Mysticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006); Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven; Colleen
McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2001); J. Edward
Wright, The Early History of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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That the Latin Apocalypse of Paul did serve as inspiration is acknowledged by scholars, indeed, by Dante himself,
when he remarks, “Io non Enea, io non Paolo sono,”(Inferno, Canto 2.32) meaning, of course, the Paul of the
Apocalypse by that statement, for the Paul of 2 Corinthians makes no mention of visiting the hellish regions of
heaven. One must remember, however, that the Latin Apocalypse of Paul coexisted in Late Antiquity with various
recensions of many of these other texts, with their various depictions of the heavens and that these apocalypses
continued to be read for some time after apocalypses like them ceased to be produced.